


Looking East

by phoebesmum



Series: The Beautiful South [3]
Category: Sports Night
Genre: Angst, Family, Gen, Pre-Canon, Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-11-17
Updated: 2009-11-17
Packaged: 2017-10-03 05:25:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,212
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14672
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/phoebesmum/pseuds/phoebesmum
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sequel to <i>The Beautiful South</i> and <i>Go West</i>. Casey and Dan are leaving Dallas for New York and <i>Sports Night</i> - a new beginning, a new life. Or so Lisa's hoping.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Looking East

**Author's Note:**

> Written June 2005. Sequel to _The Beautiful South_ and _Go West_. In which Lisa gets her say. No slash, but there's UST and subtext if you know where to look.

We're packing up the house, getting ready to move to New York, and Charlie's moping. He doesn't want to go. He doesn't want to leave his school, all his friends, or the park across the road with the really cool play area where everything's made out of tyres, or Rafferty, the Irish terrier who lives next door, who comes and talks to him through the fence (Charlie does most of the talking; Rafferty's more of a listener). He doesn't want to leave his home. This is the only one he's ever known, or at least the only one he remembers, and he's missing it already. I'm trying to cheer him up by teaching him all the songs about New York that I can think of. He's learned that The Bronx Is Up And The Battery's Down - which, you never know, might come in useful one day - and also that it's So Good They Named It Twice, and now we are Spreading The News We're Leaving Today ("Tomorrow, Mommy!"). We've invented a little dance routine that we fit around packing his soft toys into the various bags and cases they prefer to travel in, and we're midway through one of the more complicated moves, one that involves me picking Charlie up and swinging him around by his ankles, when Casey comes in.

That's the signal for us to stop what we're doing, because Casey's got that tight-eyed, thin-lipped look he puts on when we're getting on his nerves and he knows he mustn't say so because that would put him in the wrong. Maybe he's worried that if I teach Charlie showtunes, I might turn him gay. You never know with Casey. He's odd, kind of edgy, about that sort of thing. If it wasn't for the fact that I can without even thinking about it name six of his work colleagues who're gay, or some variation on the theme, I'd think he was actually homophobic, but that can't be it. Maybe it's just Casey and his ingrained dislike of having to deal with other people and their insistence on having lives of their own. He wouldn't tell me, no matter what. Casey's problem, or one of Casey's problems, one of the things that irritates me most about him, is that he won't communicate. Which, given that he talks for a living, is ironic. But he'll never talk about anything that matters. If something's bothering him he'll just clam up, go all tight-lipped and withdrawn, and expect me to know what the problem is, or what I've done wrong this time. And, not being a mind-reader, I hardly ever do know. So I end up having to play Twenty Questions (only sometimes the questions run into the hundreds) to figure out what the answer is, and even then quite often it's nothing worth knowing; he'll be sulky because wardrobe picked him out a tie he didn't like, or the lighting on set was too bright or too dim, or because the camera angles weren't the best they could be, or there were two seconds of dead air time between features.

Right at this moment, all he says is, "Don't you think Charlie's a little big for that, Lisa?" This is one of Casey's favourite weapons and tactics in the War To Be The One Charlie Loves Best: the 'You're a big boy now, Mommy treats you like a baby' assault, aka the Dirty Bomb. This one first came into play about eighteen months ago. Charlie had one of his chest infections and he was tucked up in bed looking small and white and peaky while I read him endless stories about rabbits and trains and dragons. Casey came in midway through a touching moral tale about two bunny brothers who were separated as children and devoted their lives to finding one another again, and he laughed and said, "Charlie, is Mommy telling you little kids' stories? You don't still want to hear those, do you?" And of course, Charlie isn't going to let his father think he likes something his father thinks is babyish, so he shook his head and pushed the book away and asked Casey to read him a story instead. Casey found him one about a Little Leaguer who everyone thought was hopeless but who, in the end, stepped up to the plate and Saved The Day, but Charlie fell asleep in the middle of it. All the books Casey wants Charlie to read are like that: books about sports, about football and baseball and the great sporting heroes of the past. It seems to have escaped his notice that Charlie can't tell one end of a bat from the other.

"Don't baby him, Lise," he's forever telling me and, as much as it drives me crazy, I have to cut him some slack because I know he's not afraid that Charlie might grow up to be a - whatever the word is now: wimp, geek, nerd, dork; if it were only up to him, Charlie could be as geeky or as nerdish as his little heart desires. He's afraid of the _consequences_ of Charlie turning out that way, he's afraid that Charlie will be an outcast, will find himself friendless and an easy target for bullies. And I know why he thinks that way. I know the hell he went through at school, that as a boy he hated sports with as much of a passion as Charlie does now, that he took up athletics as a means of self-defence and _forced_ himself to like it. I know because he's turned it into a funny story - "You wouldn't believe what a loser I was when I was a kid!" - and what he left out of the story, I figured out for myself. And I also know, or at least I can certainly make a good guess, why he did that. I suspect that it had very little to do with peer pressure and a great deal to do with my father-in-law, and perhaps also something to do with _his_ father, who was still alive when I first married Casey, a tall, stooped, shambling wreck of a man with a bullhorn voice and terrifying bushy white eyebrows. I believe that it's a tradition that stretches back through the McCall family to what I once, as a joke, called 'time immoral', only to have Casey spend twenty minutes correcting me.

And for all his care, it's somehow escaped Casey's attention that Charlie already _is_ a geek, dork, nerd, whatever, and a proud one, that he was the head of geek/dork society at the school he's just left, the nucleus of a tight little circle of defiant nerds: head of the chess club, captain of the junior debating society, class spelling champion. He knows that Charlie's test scores in math and English and earth science come back time after time as straight As, and he's proud of that, no doubt about it. But he'd be even prouder if Charlie were the first one picked for every sports team, and even though he doesn't say so, Charlie knows it.

I'm still holding Charlie by the ankles. I lower him carefully to the floor, and he climbs to his feet and looks up at his dad. He says, "It's fun, Daddy," in the tight, careful little voice that comes out of him whenever he thinks Casey might be angry, or that he and I might be about to fight. It makes me furious to hear Charlie sound like that, as if he's afraid of his own father. If anything would ever make me leave Casey, that would be it. I know he's a good husband and I'm lucky to have him - my mother told me that when I rang her up, crying, when I thought he'd been unfaithful to me. But I've seen Casey and _his_ father together, and I don't like what I see. I won't have him damaging Charlie the same way. The McCall buck stops here, right here, with this generation.

Casey just says, "H'm," and then he looks at me over Charlie's head and says, "It won't be any fun if Mommy drops you." Then he casts his eye around the room, with a critical frown. "Do you honestly still need all this stuff, Charlie? Some of these are really babies' toys, wouldn't you like to give them to the hospital for the children there?"

I could kill him.

Charlie looks up at him and swallows. "Okay," he says, in his smallest voice, and I say, "Casey, can I talk to you outside for a moment?" I'm very careful to control my own voice, but even so, Charlie looks back at me in alarm.

"Mom - Dad - please don't fight?"

I pat his shoulder, feeling his fragile little bird-bones, and wish once again that he were bigger, stronger. Not that he isn't perfect as he is. I just worry. "We won't," I promise him, which is only about the millionth lie I've ever told him for his own good.

But, of course, we will. We get out into the hallway and Casey says wearily, "What is it now, Lise?"

I say, very, very calmly, "Casey. Please let Charlie alone. He's upset enough about the move and all the upheaval. He needs his things around him. It doesn't matter if _you_ think he's grown out of them. He's used to them, he's fond of them, and they're part of his life."

He says, still in that same tired voice, "Lisa, is this about you not wanting to move? Because if it is - "

"It isn't," I say. Quite the opposite. I'm _dying_ to get out of Dallas. I've hated it from the moment we got here. I'd thought we were going to escape two years ago, and Casey had let me down then. I can't wait to get to New York and get back into the groove of life in my favourite city on earth.

"It's a little late, is all I'm saying."

"Casey, are you even listening to me? I'm _fine_ with the move. It's Charlie who's feeling a little bit insecure, and all I'm saying is that the least we can do for him is not add to that."

He sighs. "Don't coddle him, Lisa. He's not a baby."

"I know he isn't, and I'm not! I'm treating him with the consideration he deserves, and the least you can do - "

The doorbell rings then, which is probably just as well. Charlie gets sick in cars, and he gets sick when he thinks Casey and I are mad at one another, which is why we're usually so careful not to raise our voices. It's bad enough the poor kid's going to have to endure one, without having to deal with the other on top of it.

It's Dan at the door, of course. It would have to be. For one thing, he's never out of our house, you'd think he didn't have a home of his own. For another, he has a knack of turning up at the worst possible moments. Charlie adores him, for some reason, so I try to get along with him, but he's one of those people who just _grates_. I don't know what it is. I can tell he likes me about as much as I like him, but we manage to be civil. That's all anyone can ask.

Dan's come to help with the move - he himself, to hear him talk, is taking nothing but the clothes on his back, a change of underwear and his toothbrush with him, and I'm not entirely certain about the change of underwear. I suppose I should be grateful we're not getting Dana too. But I have no doubt that Dana, by way of contrast, has twice as much stuff as Casey and Charlie and me all put together and won't be able to part with any of it. Come to think of it, I suppose I should be grateful that Dan and Casey are here, not over at Dana's helping her. They probably will be, later on.

I put Dan on Charlie duty which, to give him due credit, is something he's actually good at. I haven't even started my own packing, and the truck's scheduled to arrive first thing tomorrow morning. I can't help but wish that we could just move the house and be done with it - all in all, this isn't a bad house, it's big enough and it has a walled yard where it's safe for Charlie to play. It took us a long time to check out real estate in New York and find anything anywhere near as good, and we'll be paying twice as much for it when we get there. But Casey will be earning twice as much, so I guess it all evens out.

I'm hoping that this move will be a new beginning for all of us. I hope that Casey will be happy and successful, for his own sake as well as for ours. I hope that I'll be able to catch up with my old friends, and get back into some of the stuff I used to enjoy doing before I turned into the archetypal mad housewife: the theatre, indie cinema, book readings, concerts - it's true, we have them here, but it's not the same, and in any case I have no-one to go with. I hope that Charlie will do well at his new school, make lots of friends, and forget he ever lived here.

Maybe we could even get a dog.

And I'm hoping that this will mean an end to the lousy marriage that we have at present, and give us a shot at getting back to the way it used to be in the beginning.

Not that it was that great in the beginning. It started disastrously. We met at college. We were in the cafeteria: he was walking from the cashier to a table, I was just leaving, he tripped over his own feet, and a big bowl of tomato soup went flying all over my new white blouse. He apologised very nicely and offered to buy me a drink sometime and, of course, I accepted, but to tell the truth, I felt what he really owed me was a new blouse. But he was a poor student - he really was pretty broke at that point in his life - so I cut him some slack. Later on I learned that he'd staged the whole thing, he'd done it for a bet. I said, "Why on earth - ?!" and he said his friends had bet he'd never get me out on a date, because I was the prettiest girl in the school. "Then why didn't you just ask me?" I asked, and he smiled his shy, slightly goofy smile, the smile I used to think was so endearing, and ducked his head, and said, "_Because_ you were the prettiest girl in the school." Which was sweet and all, but I wasn't sure it was any compensation for my blouse, which was silk, which I'd barely been able to afford, and which I'd worn exactly once.

So, really, if you want to look at it that way, you could argue that he's been lying to me ever since the day we met.

I wish I could forgive him for cheating on me. Either that, or I wish I'd had the courage to leave him when it happened. But my mother told me not to be a baby; she said that all men cheat. My mother doesn't believe in divorce, and I don't mean she doesn't believe in it as in she thinks it's a bad thing. She doesn't believe in it the way other people don't believe in Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy. One of my cousins got divorced five years ago, and Mom still sends Christmas cards to her and her husband, and talks about 'that little bit of trouble Misty's going through'.

I look at myself in the mirror as I lift it from the wall, look at the lines around my eyes and, worse, around my mouth, lines that drag at the edges of my lips and give me a perpetual scowl, and I realise that I've turned into an angry, bitter, punishing woman. Turned, in fact, into my own mother. And, setting aside the affair for a moment and looking at our lives objectively, I realise I'm blaming Casey for something that's not even his fault. I'm blaming him for not being the man I'd imagined him to be, the man I'd wanted him to be. The man of my dreams.

Poor Casey. He never could have been that. I do believe he tried, at least in the beginning. But I wasn't what he really wanted. I was not, by any means, the woman of _his_ dreams, no matter how pretty he thought I was; I think he would secretly have liked a perfect '50s housewife, someone to keep an immaculate house and cook the way his mother used to and be waiting on the doorstep for him to call out, "Honey! I'm home!" Not that he would have ever admitted to that. But he does like to be _comfortable_. Poor, poor Casey. I don't think I'm an especially comforting sort of person. We did our best for a couple of years, but after that he couldn't pretend any more. Although he went on trying. So did I. Because we owed that much to Charlie.

I don't know if you can put a specific date on the day our marriage died. It wasn't a swift, merciful death. It was long drawn out and painful and undignified, the kind of death that makes you question your faith and rethink your stand on euthanasia.

The symptoms? He forgot anniversaries; I cooked food he barely touched. He bought me jewellery I hated; I painted the bedroom a duck-egg blue that made him feel sick.

And none of those things were deliberate, any more than when he criticised my grammar and I laughed at his taste in clothes. Or when he looked down on me for reading chick-lit - although maybe he was right; I've come to think that maybe romantic fiction does, in fact, raise our expectations so that we go through life in a haze of perpetual disappointment - or when I made him wash his own gym clothes and keep his sports gear in the garage. Or when I asked him not to have his friends round any more.

His friends. His colleagues, really; Casey's not good at making friends. Whatever you call them, I hated them. They were a bunch of tedious, self-interested, sports-obsessed bores. When we first moved here, he used to have a bunch of them hang out here for big games, but after the third time I'd found cigarette holes in my best throw pillows and vomit in the guest bathroom I put a stop to that. I didn't say he couldn't see them, I made it clear they were welcome to come over for dinner, two or three at a time, but he reacted like a sulky teenager being asked to tidy his bedroom. As for my friends, artsy feminist intellectuals that they were, he would have hated them every bit as much if I'd filled the house with them. But I'd left them all behind when we moved halfway across the country, and all I had in Dallas were acquaintances. Except for Dana, of course. I'd known Dana in college and we'd been friends then. But I suspected she was the one sleeping with my husband and, after that, things between us kind of cooled off.

That happened after the LA trip, the one where Casey picked up that pathetic little award he was so absurdly proud of. The trip I hadn't been invited on. I couldn't have gone, but it never seemed to occur to Casey that I might take, you know, a fleeting interest in what was going on in his life. We quarrelled before he went; he phoned once while he was out there, just once in two days. We fought then, too. And then he came home with lipstick on his shirt and an unmistakeable hickey on his shoulder.

We didn't quarrel about that. I pretended I hadn't noticed. He pretended he believed me. I pretended I was too tired for sex - actually, it wasn't much of a pretence, Charlie was going through a sickly phase where he picked up every infection going, and taking care of him left me drained, tired all the time, as cranky and irritable as Charlie himself - and Casey didn't try to talk me out of it. In fact, he actually seemed relieved. But then, after the first year or so, our sex life's never been fantastic. It's not _bad_; it just could be better, is all. Charlie's was a difficult birth, and it took me months after he was born to get back in the mood - I faked it as well as I could, I didn't think it was fair to Casey, but I honestly don't think he got much out of it either, he didn't bother me about it that much. And Casey … how do I put this? I don't want to sound bitchy, but … I can't help but sound bitchy. Put it this way: he does all the right things, in more or less the right order. He just never seems that interested. He's … dutiful. Passionless, as if his mind's elsewhere. Which may be true. Possibly it's with Dana. Whatever.

So, anyway. A couple of months later Casey got a call from a network affiliate in LA. They flew him out there to talk about a new show - not sports; a late-night talk show. They said, or Casey told me they said, that he could be the new Johnny Carson. He came back, swelling with pride at a job well done, and I was actually happy for him. Not to mention relieved at the prospect of a life that didn't revolve entirely around baseball scores and football trades. We went out to dinner, left Charlie with Dan, who'd just moved to Dallas a couple of weeks earlier -

Dan. Poor kid, at the time I felt sorry for him. He'd been working in LA and pretty happy, from what I could make out, but Casey had talked him into taking the co-anchor job on his new show at Lone Star. Mostly, if I know my husband - which I do - because Casey just wanted a friend to get the job rather than try to get used to working with some unknown quantity, some stranger. It would have been ironic if, after going to all that trouble, Casey had just upped stakes and gone to LA and left Dan behind in Dallas, but, quite honestly, that would have just been Dan's bad luck; I wasn't _that_ sorry for him. I was sorry for him because he was in much the same position as I was - he didn't know anyone, he hated Dallas, he was lonely and homesick. And, although I wasn't supposed to know this, he had the additional problem that he was gay and the network was trying to force him into the closet. They succeeded eventually, but he fought hard against it, and I felt a lot of sympathy for him. I went out of my way to invite him round, to let Casey know he was welcome to ask him back for dinner or just to hang out, and Dan became a regular visitor to our house. Which he still is, of course, although he's never seemed quite comfortable here. Or, correction, he's never seemed comfortable with me. I couldn't figure out why, and then it dawned on me that _duh_, Casey probably used Dan as a sounding board when he wanted to vent about what a bitch Lisa was, and how Lisa didn't understand him, and how Lisa was holding him back in his career, and how she spoilt Charlie and was a terrible mother. So no wonder if he didn't like me. Or maybe he knew about Casey's affair and felt embarrassed. Maybe a bit of both.

In spite of that - maybe because of that - I have to admit that having Dan here in Dallas has helped Casey a lot. They work well together, their styles complement one another, and they look very good together; they're a team. Casey seems calmer, happier for having Dan around, less inclined to snap at me and Charlie. And, even though he gets on my nerves, Dan's good for both Casey and Charlie. I can't dislike him as much as I'd like to. Which is annoying.

So, Casey and I went out, and we had dinner, a lovely, peaceful, private, grown-up dinner all on our own, with food I hadn't had to cook, and music, and wine - _lots_ of wine, and no-one suddenly popping up by the table to demand a glass of water or an extra blanket for their teddy bear. Came home. Got rid of Dan. And had great sex, sex that we actually both enjoyed, for the first time in months. I thought maybe this would change things; maybe we could go back to being happy together.

They phoned back the next day. They loved him, they wanted him, how soon could he start? And I started dreaming of LA. In my mind, I'd already packed my bags and said goodbye to Dallas, kicked the dust of Texas off my shoes. I was saying hello to the LA sunshine - not that Dallas didn't have sunshine; it had way too much of it - hello to palm trees and the Pacific Ocean. I've always loved the sea. Hello to Hollywood and glamour. To fame, fame that Casey well deserved. To more money, a better life for us, better schools and a better future for Charlie. A shot at making our lives into the life we'd always dreamed of.

Casey turned the job down.

I could have cried with frustration. I didn't. I didn't yell, either. I just asked him, very carefully, why on earth he would be so idiotic (I didn't say that; I was trying to be polite. I might have implied it, but I did try not to) as to turn down the opportunity of a lifetime. And all he could do was blether: he wasn't ready for it, it was too much, he'd be no good at it, he'd embarrass himself, the show would crash and burn and we'd be left with nothing. Which was nonsense. No matter how mad at him I may be, I can't deny that Casey is handsome and charismatic, a witty and intelligent writer, a skilful, probing but sympathetic interviewer. He would have been great. And he knew it too, he has to have done. Casey is not shy or retiring; he's pretty much a walking ego on legs. So there must have been some other reason.

It wasn't because he loved Dallas; I'd had to listen to him complain about it often enough, and bite my tongue, because all the things he hated about it were the things he had told _me_ were ridiculous when I'd been the one complaining. And it wasn't that the job at Lone Star was so great; he was well aware of its limitations, and endlessly frustrated at them. Even though he was starting a new show with Dan, he had no real reason to think things there would improve very much. So there was something else. Some other reason he didn't want to leave Dallas. Some other reason he didn't want to leave Lone Star.

I could only think of one thing it might be.

The next time I saw Dana, I was really quite unforgivably rude to her. I know I shouldn't have been. I didn't have any evidence. But all the circumstances seemed to fit.

Two years later, it all started again: he got a mysterious telephone call, and had to go out of town on business. He didn't tell me anything about it; I didn't even know that he'd been to New York until I found his hotel receipt folded into a pocket when I was taking one of his suits to the laundry. A few weeks after that he came to bed one night and got in beside me, sat tapping his fingers against his leg for a couple of very irritating minutes, and eventually managed to do me the favour of sharing.

"I've had a job offer," he told me. He sounded wary. I imagine he was remembering the mess he'd made of the last job offer. And I tried, I really did, but I couldn't help but sound a little bit frosty as I said, "Oh? And are you planning on taking this one?"

"It's up to you," he said, but I knew that was a lie. If he wanted it, he'd take it and talk me round; if he didn't want it, he'd turn it down and never mind what I thought. "It's in New York - they want all three of us, Dana and Danny as well as me - "

That was it, then. He was going to take it.

Sure enough, he did. And now here we are, packing up our lives, all ready to start a brand new one in a brand new city, a brand new state.

Maybe this time we'll get it right.

*

In Charlie's room, Charlie is demonstrating his new dance moves to Dan, who's deeply impressed, and singing the songs Lisa taught him, with a few improvised lyrics of his own where he can't remember the right ones. Apparently New York is home to both candles and mice, which Dan thinks sounds interesting; he looks forward to seeing it. Dan reflects, hardly for the first time, that, as much as he'd like to deny it, Lisa really is a good mother to Charlie. It doesn't, as far as he's concerned, make up for the way she makes Casey miserable, but it does mean he can't quite hate her as much as he'd like.

Which is annoying.

He joins in with Charlie's singing and when they're done he teaches him a couple of songs that Lisa didn't think of. Tomorrow, in the car, Charlie will sing every one of these songs over and over, in between bouts of throwing up, and then neither Lisa nor Casey will have any reason to like Dan very much. Dan won't know this; he'll be in the air, already more than halfway to his new home, his new life. A life that's going to be so much better than the one he's had here in Dallas. If still not quite perfect.

Casey? Casey's not thinking at all. Sometimes it's easier that way. Casey is slowly, deliberately dismantling all the elements of his life in Texas, packing them with care and labelling them neatly. He'll unpack them just as carefully when he gets to where he's going and set them all out in order. Nothing will have changed. Nothing at all.

As for Charlie - Charlie's just happy that, for once in his life, no-one is yelling.

***


End file.
